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I found black-hat content marketers: sockpuppet bloggers, fake Reddit/HN accts

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Re: I found black-hat content marketers: sockpuppet bloggers, fake Reddit/HN accts

#161

Post by evgen »

gingerlime wrote: post #154
dang wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The rule is against insinuating astroturfing without evidence. The alternative is threads full of pointless insinuation about astroturfing—the favorite junk pastime of internet forums. HN doesn't have "particular objectives", it has one objective: to gratify intellectual curiosity, and that guideline is obviously integral to this. That doesn't make actual astroturfing ok. We spend many hours combating it and banning…

Just curious, but what constitutes evidence in this context? And how do you deal with the other side of "unfair" behaviour, e.g. excessive flagging or downvoting for legitimate posts or comments. As far as I'm aware there isn't any evidence required to downvote or flag.

'Fairness' has no relevance when it comes to a site's participants deciding among themselves what is and is not worth discussing. Perhaps those posts and commands that were flagged or downvoted were considered less legitimate than you might have suspected by the rest of the userbase.

Re: I found black-hat content marketers: sockpuppet bloggers, fake Reddit/HN accts

#162

Post by ivanche »

warent wrote: post #18

I don't endorse this behavior at all but can it really be said to be black-hat? imho seems more gray to me. From what I understand, content _is_ being generated and there are attempts to boost the SEO, so they're providing a service and it's not outright theft. At worst it just sounds like poor practice and gaming the system. They're not acting maliciously, illegally, and/or destructively, which is how I've always de…

I agree. From the twitter thread, I clicked on random Medium user and on hos random article. Yes, there was a passage about one company's product. But boy, there were 15 passages of pragmatic, no BS content which I found very useful - I'd even say it was above average written article.

Re: I found black-hat content marketers: sockpuppet bloggers, fake Reddit/HN accts

#163

Post by nl »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #155
nl wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those guidelines are voluntary, sure. But there are actual laws included (section 5 of of the FTC Act (15 U.S.C. 45)) that make some things actually illegal. Specifically: "Unfair methods of competition in or affecting commerce, and unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce, are hereby declared unlawful."[1] This voluntary guide helps people understand how the FTC inteprates that law. Deciding no…

> Specifically: "Unfair methods of competition in or affecting commerce, and unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce, are hereby declared unlawful."[1] This is one of the least appropriate uses of the word "specifically" I've ever seen. That law just says "Don't do bad things. You know who you are."

It's often written like this, and regulations define more specific things (or it's left to judges).

Re: I found black-hat content marketers: sockpuppet bloggers, fake Reddit/HN accts

#164

Post by nl »

ineedasername wrote: post #140
nl wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those guidelines are voluntary, sure. But there are actual laws included (section 5 of of the FTC Act (15 U.S.C. 45)) that make some things actually illegal. Specifically: "Unfair methods of competition in or affecting commerce, and unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce, are hereby declared unlawful."[1] This voluntary guide helps people understand how the FTC inteprates that law. Deciding no…

Yep, there's lots of gray area. But not disclosing a financial arrangement isn't illegal in itself. It's only in the last few years that Youtube even had an option to flag videos as "contains paid promotions", though now they do require that to be flagged if you're getting paid.

> But not disclosing a financial arrangement isn't illegal in itself.

What is making you think this is true? It's not.

For example 3/4 of the example cases here are around undisclosed financial arrangements in influencer marketing, and in all cases the company admitted fault: https://mediakix.com/blog/ftc-influencer-marketing-violation...

I'm not sure what your definition of illegal is, but there is a law that the FTC is using to win legal cases on the issue.

Re: I found black-hat content marketers: sockpuppet bloggers, fake Reddit/HN accts

#165

Post by nindalf »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #43
troydavis wrote: post #3

The Twitter thread has a lot more. There's a person or firm who is doing black-hat content marketing at scale. They either approach freelance bloggers to write articles about their clients (to be submitted to Medium-hosted and similar blogs as if written by unaffiliated users), or create Medium profiles for fake names and write the posts themselves. Posts have appeared in Better Programming, DEV.to, FAUN, freeCodeCam…

It would be a good idea to present stronger evidence before saying HN is astroturfable. It has one of the strongest anti astroturf systems I’ve seen, primarily because of how HN works (which, sadly, is hard to discuss openly). I believe you about Reddit, but it’s going to be quite hard to buy your way into HN, no matter how cleverly you do it. I’m not saying it’s impossible. But it’s so easy to believe, and so hard t…

HN hands out shadowbans like candy for people suspected of vote manipulation. I completely agree with this approach because it keeps the site clean.

An interesting question to ask is if HN owes it to its users to be more transparent about responses like shadow banning and provide ways to appeal such responses. Most of would say no, the current approach is working for us and we should keep it going. But then I wonder why we’re ok with HN behaving like this but not large social media companies.

Re: I found black-hat content marketers: sockpuppet bloggers, fake Reddit/HN accts

#166

Post by oefrha »

barumi wrote: post #156
sillysaurusx wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be a good idea to present stronger evidence before saying HN is astroturfable. It has one of the strongest anti astroturf systems I’ve seen, primarily because of how HN works (which, sadly, is hard to discuss openly). I believe you about Reddit, but it’s going to be quite hard to buy your way into HN, no matter how cleverly you do it. I’m not saying it’s impossible. But it’s so easy to believe, and so hard t…

> It would be a good idea to present stronger evidence before saying HN is astroturfable. What? You do realize anyone can create HN accounts to post any link and comment on any discussion, right? Even if you argue that there are magical ex post facto measures to tackle obvious and rampant abuse, you do understand that the system is indeed vulnerable to astroturfers right in its very design, don't you?

Anyone can create HN accounts to post any link and comment on any discussion, but certain accounts are dead on arrival, and votes from certain accounts don’t count, so you can pollute /new or discussions (especially for users with showdead on), but that doesn’t mean your content automatically get prime spot placement just by registering more accounts.

Meanwhile, clickbaiting is much more effective than creating accounts.

Re: I found black-hat content marketers: sockpuppet bloggers, fake Reddit/HN accts

#167

Post by ComodoHacker »

troydavis wrote: post #3

The Twitter thread has a lot more. There's a person or firm who is doing black-hat content marketing at scale. They either approach freelance bloggers to write articles about their clients (to be submitted to Medium-hosted and similar blogs as if written by unaffiliated users), or create Medium profiles for fake names and write the posts themselves. Posts have appeared in Better Programming, DEV.to, FAUN, freeCodeCam…

>You can see some of these on HN here:

Looking at comments and upvotes numbers, it's not like their HN efforts were any effective.

Re: I found black-hat content marketers: sockpuppet bloggers, fake Reddit/HN accts

#168

Post by OrderlyTiamat »

higerordermap wrote: post #106
sillysaurusx wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be a good idea to present stronger evidence before saying HN is astroturfable. It has one of the strongest anti astroturf systems I’ve seen, primarily because of how HN works (which, sadly, is hard to discuss openly). I believe you about Reddit, but it’s going to be quite hard to buy your way into HN, no matter how cleverly you do it. I’m not saying it’s impossible. But it’s so easy to believe, and so hard t…

HN / reddit / lobsters whatever programmer link aggregators may be astroturfed. But after a while you will learn to recognise the smell of astroturfing and even otherwise, they are refuted by commenters. More likely that there are fanboys that come with irrational arguments rather than astroturfing in these forums. The greater harm of these content marketing bullshit is it pollutes Google search results. If you searc…

I've been pleasantly surprised by content om DZone at least, though the others less so.

Re: I found black-hat content marketers: sockpuppet bloggers, fake Reddit/HN accts

#169

Post by Const-me »

barumi wrote: post #158
nitrogen wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I think it would have been less work for them to be legit I had the same conclusion when someone told me about the dozens of cheap/used Android devices they and their roommates used to get paid to "watch" ads. Apparently there are apps that will pay you for ads you watch, and you can babysit them pretty easily to make like..... $200/mo.

Just to keep things in perspective, $200/month is already the median income of some places.

Which places do you have in mind? Globally, the median is close to $800/month per household.

Re: I found black-hat content marketers: sockpuppet bloggers, fake Reddit/HN accts

#170

Post by bengale »

I'm not sure this is surprising really. It wasn't that long ago when there was clearly a targeted campaign against zoom across channels where you'd expect engagement from technical people.

I don't know if it wasn't doing its job, or if something like that just can't be maintained long term but it seemed to peter off relatively quickly.

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